Andrew Fire, Stanford University
Date: July 2, 2025 @ 16:00 
Location: Small lecture Theatre at the Poynting Physics Building 
Title: Why we still expect the unexpected in genetics
 

Abstract: 
The landscape faced by a living cell is constantly changing. Developmental transitions, environmental shifts, and pathogenic invasions lend a dynamic character to both the genome and its activity pattern.  While some of the dynamicism in biology comes from shifts in chromosome structure and how genes are expressed, there is a long history of studies defining non-chromosomal "replicon" elements that have their own propagation strategies and that can act beyond the chromosome as agents of genetic change and maintenance.  Such replicon agents include a panoply of previously (and often still) uncharacterized DNA, RNA, and protein elements that straddle boundaries between genome, virome, and mobilome.  The corresponding propagation and control mechanisms likewise span a spectrum between systems activated during normal development and systems for detecting and responding to foreign or unwanted genetic activity.  We use a variety of experimental and computational approaches to identify and study replicon molecules that have emerged in living systems, and to define the means by which these elements emerge, replicate, and confer heritable traits.  At the root of these studies are searches for unexpected genetic and genomic entities and questions of how a cell can distinguish "self" versus "nonself" and "wanted" versus "unwanted" gene activity.  In this talk, I will illustrate our ongoing efforts to discover novel replicons, to characterize their modes of replication and roles in propagation of traits, and to understand their potential as mediators of genetic constancy and change.

 

Short Bio of Andrew Fire: Nobel Prize in medicine in 2006. A native of Santa Clara County, California, Prof. Fire received training at UC Berkeley (Mathematics BA: 1975-1978), MIT (Biology Ph.D.: 1978-1983), and the Medical Research Council Laboratory in Cambridge UK (Postdoctoral: 1983-1986).  From 1986 to 2003, Prof. Fire was on the staff of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Embryology in Baltimore Maryland.  During his time in Baltimore, Prof. Fire assumed the position of Adjunct Professor of Biology at Johns Hopkins University.  In 2003, Prof. Fire joined the faculty of the Departments of Pathology and Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine.